Using xda with googlesheets in R

Want to do a quick, exploratory data analysis in R of your data that’s stored in a spreadsheet on Google Drive? You’re in luck, because now you can use the new xda package in conjunction with Jenny Bryan‘s googlesheets. There are some quirks, though, and that’s what this post is all about.

Before proceeding, you should review this recent article from R-Bloggers called “Introducing xda”.

First, be sure to install the googlesheets and xda packages. Although googlesheets is on CRAN, xdais not, and you’ll have to bring it in directly from github. You can actually do the same for googlesheets if you like:

Next, you’ll have to show R how to access your Google spreadsheet. While you are looking at your spreadsheet, go to File -> Publish to the Web. The URL that’s in the text box is the one you want to capture. Just to make sure it works, copy and paste it into a new browser address window and see if you can display your spreadsheet in your browser.

charSummary – takes a data frame as an argument, provides counts, missing data info, and number of unique factors for quantitative variables

bivariate – takes a data frame and two quantitative variables as an argument, and performs a quick bivariate analysis (giving this categorical variables, or giving this one categorical and one quantitative variable, will throw an error)

Here’s what happens when you run those commands on the data you just loaded in from your Google spreadsheet:

There is a fourth “Plot” command but I couldn’t get it to work on any googlesheetsdata. The xda package is looking for class(range) to be anything other than “function”, which it was for every sheet I attempted to load.

There really should be an extra column in xda that displays the enumeration of all the unique values for the factors. It felt great to know how many unique values there were, but I would love to be reminded of what they are too, unless there are too many of them.

Please share your experiences using xda & googlesheets together in the comments! Thanks!